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AP Photo/Stephan Savoia House Speaker Paul Ryan addresses workers at a New Balance athletic shoe factory after he toured the factory floor in Lawrence, Massachusetts. trickle-downers_35.jpg H ouse Speaker Paul Ryan switched gears on Thursday to talk about something completely different: “Made in America Week” and federal tax code reform—two of the GOP’s current talking points as their lawmakers scurry to change the subject from their own Made in Washington health-care debacle. President Donald Trump launched “Made in America Week” at the White House, displaying such products as door hinges, crab pots, and brooms wholly manufactured stateside. Placing the event in the proper temporal context, The Guardian describe d the 50-state showcase as a “museum of American capitalism.” Meanwhile, the president posed gleefully with fire engines from Wisconsin and wore a Stetson cowboy hat from Texas. Truth is indeed stranger than fake news. Fresh off his sundry attempts to roll back health care,...

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) People with family members who were killed by undocumented immigrants meet with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on June 29, 2017. O n Thursday, the House passed the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act , which proposes to withhold federal funding from localities that refuse to cooperate with Trump administration immigration measures aimed at criminal noncitizens and other undocumented people. The bill would also allow individuals and close family members of individuals who are victims of felonies committed by undocumented immigrants who have been released from local or state custody against the advice of federal authorities to file suit against states. The day before, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the new president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, called on Congress to work on bipartisan immigration and criminal justice law reforms, adding that cities could use more federal assistance to fight terrorism and crime, and provide mental illness, substance abuse, and...

AP Photo/Susan Walsh A supporter listens as President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “ We will rebuild rural America,” President Donald Trump told an adoring audience at the Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a few days ago. The president enjoys tantalizing the public with hints about his gonna-be-great-again infrastructure plans. But there is enough evidence to make clear that those “beautiful red” rural communities and the people that Trump professes to love are ones that are going to get shafted: Trump’s plans for rebuilding rural America may only further isolate those regions from the healthier sectors of the economy. “We have to make sure American farmers and their families, wherever they may be, wherever they may go, have the infrastructure projects that they need to compete and grow,” Trump proclaimed. But the details of the infrastructure plans that have trickled out of Washington so far only heighten anxieties about rural America’s...

AP Photo/Steven Senne Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker takes questions from members of the media during a news conference at the Statehouse in Boston. L ast month, the Pew Charitable Trusts released its “Rainy Day Funds and State Credit Ratings” report, which explored how state policymakers can avoid damaging credit-rating downgrades. “In times of economic expansion, the agencies will reward states that deposit growing revenue as a cushion against future budget gaps when the economic cycle declines,” Pew noted. Pew spotlighted Massachusetts, where Republican Governor Charlie Baker and state legislative leaders steered $200 million into the state’s stabilization or “rainy day” fund in fiscal 2016 in the hope of staving off a black mark from Wall Street’s powerful credit-ratings agencies. The state’s move came after finger-wagging from Standard & Poor’s about the Bay State’s bad habit of dipping into the fund to plug budget holes and failing to adequately replenish it—a strategy...